How to Use a USB Hard Drive for more Storage on Xbox 360

- A hard drive of your choice. The drive of choice is not important as long as you can get a USB 2.0 adapter for that type of drive.

- A USB 2.0 adapter for the type of drive you will be using.

If your using a laptop 2.5″ ATA drive that has a form factor height of 9.5mm or less then then a Ultra slim USB 2.0 case is perfect and looks great atop the 360’s stock hard drive. Just about any USB 2.0 adapter will work. If you are using a 3.5″ IDE drive you will need the appropriate USB 2.0 adapter for that drive.

The Xbox 360 supports removable and portable devices via USB. Most of these devices use the FAT32 file system which is capable of volume sizes up to 2 TB. Windows 2000 and XP can read and write to FAT32 volumes of large size but cannot natively create or format them above 32 GB. In order to create a FAT32 partition and format it above 32GB you will need a utility like Partition Magic or some other drive/partition utility. Windows 98 does support the creation and formatting of FAT32 partitions up to 127 GB in size. If you have 98 installed or a 98 boot disk with FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM you would have all you need for up to that 127GB mark pending your drive is installed via the IDE interface or you have a USB driver loaded.

This is a really simple process. First assemble the drive with the USB adapter. Next plug the unit into your PC. If your running Windows XP most USB adapters will be automatically recognized and installed. If you are running an older operating system you may need to install a driver for the adapter

Next create a new FAT32 partition on the newly installed device. Again if the drive is larger than 32GB you will need to use a utility like Partition Magic to create the volume. If the drive is smaller than 32GB you can accomplish this via the “Computer Management” snap in found in the Control Panel -> Administrative tools. Last you need to format the volume. The same rule applies for formatting as well; if it is larger than 32GB you will need some other utility like partition magic to format. Again, windows XP and 2000 does not natively support the creation and formatting of devices larger than 32GB but it does support reading and writing from these large partitions.

Once you’ve got it all done you should be able to load content to the drive via windows. Plug it into your 360 and go to media and select portable device and bam.. there’s YOUR media. Again USB storage devices cannot be used for Xbox Live Marketplace content.